A celebrity story (Tony Randall) from Author Ben Bryant’s entertainment book: Circumstances Beyond My Control

This is the only

celebrity story

from my tenure at Ansel productions: Chapter 14 of My Journey, Book 2
Although Jerry Ansel Productions was, in the 1970s and ‘80s, one of New York City’s busiest commercial production companies, a celebrity story was rare. For eight months I was the studio manager and everyone who worked there for any length of time got a real education in filmmaking. Hence the appellation in the next paragraph.

“During my matriculation at the Ansel University of Film the only big name I recall working with was Tony Randall. What the product was, who knows?

Buy Circumstances Beyond My Control

“There’s a lot of opinion on both sides of the typecasting question regarding actors. It is a well established fact that many movie stars of the Big Studio period nearly always played virtually the same character. Only rarely did, say, Gregory Peck play a bad guy and if he did the character had some specific kind of integrity such as Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter or Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. The point is that the most successful movie and TV actors rarely strayed from a certain type, and often this type was very close to their real personality.

“Mr. Randall was Felix Unger. He was neither a disagreeable nor an unfriendly man but he was persnickety to a fault. Having recently quit his cigarette habit he would tolerate no smoking anywhere near him. In those days more than half the people smoked and it was not forbidden even on a sound stage – unless Tony Randall was in the cast. We had been warned about this and the smoking lamp had not been lit.

“All went well until late morning when, right in the middle of a take, Randall stopped and said in stentorian tones, ‘Someone is smoking!’

“We all looked around but there was no malefactor in sight. Mr. Randall – nobody called him Tony – was adamant. So I was dispatched to find the culprit.

“It was a small studio and completely sealed (for sound) so I went out the padded door and sniffed no fumes in the office. I was bewildered. Finally I went out the main door and there, on the sidewalk, were two guys talking and one of them was smoking. I politely requested that they move down the block which, fortunately, they did.

“We took a short break while the exhaust fan was run and I posted one of my boys on the sidewalk on nicotine patrol. The shoot continued and we finished the day without further unpleasantness.

“With that one exception Tony Randall was very agreeable, professional and easy to work with.”

Buy Circumstances Beyond My Control

Tags: ,

Comments & Responses

Comments are closed.

2024 © InkThemes. All rights reserved.